Business

I’ve always thought of myself as teacher.

But, as OSTraining has grown in the last several years, I’ve found myself moving into the role of a manager rather than a teacher. 

Still, the two roles have a lot in common.

One of the biggest similarities is that you really need to be careful about the behavior you model. For example, I often used to work weekends. Some Saturdays and Sundays, I’d send emails, make site changes and be noticeably busy.

Continue reading “Never be seen working on the weekend”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get a better handle on our business over at OSTraining.com. Since the launch early last years, things have been growing faster than my ability to analyze and understand it.

It’s been a pretty sobering experience so far and I ended up experiencing some pretty eye-opening problems with all the tools out there?

First, I realised once and for all that the major payment gateways are really living in the 1990s when it comes to their websites. We use PayPal and Authorize.net  for payments and “wow!”, they do not make it easy to do any analysis. GaragePay helped us to get the data into a usable format from PayPal (thanks to Kyle from PixelPraise for that suggestion) but I’ve not found a good tool yet for Authorize.

Continue reading “Any good CRMs or ERPs for Online Businesses?”

This might be the most expensive blog post I’ve ever written, but here goes …

This week I was talking to a developer who sells open source products and their attitude was that they fight even single customer refund request..

I was pretty shocked – we always, always give refunds. Over at Open Source Training you can get a full refund at any point during your membership  – any point, even 5 months and 30 days into a 6 month membership.

I told the developer that we’d write up a list of our reasons to see if he was convinced:

Continue reading “Why We Always Give Refunds”

Building an online reputation begins with your website. It is the first place people go to “check you out,” even if you have been highly recommended by clients or peers.  So, crafting an effective and powerful message in conjunction with an aesthetically pleasing site, a well-organized site and one with a clear call to action sometimes means hiring a good writer.

There are a bunch of reasons to hire a good content writer, but I will only mention the three I think are most pertinent to web site progress.

1. You hate to write!  That’s a no brainer in my opinion.
2. Your website project has come to a screeching halt!  Your web developer has told you that he/she cannot move forward without your content and you don’t have time to deal with that right now.
3. You have run out of creative ideas! If you are working solo – this just happens unless you have collaborative partners.

Continue reading “3 Reasons to Hire a Content Writer”

There’s a Japanese show that moved to the BBC as “Dragon’s Den” and is in the U.S. now as “Shark Tank”. The format is simple: one business owner stands in front of five millionaires and tries to get investment in their company.

I watched two episodes of the BBC version last week and one phrase kept getting repeated “lifestyle business”. This meant:

• Started primarily because the founder enjoyed doing what they’re doing
• Depend largely on the skills of one person, with a few possible hangers-on.
• Are difficult to scale in income or quantity.

Needless to say, they didn’t get investment. The more I listened, the more it sounded like the situation I was in a couple of years ago.

Continue reading “Lifestyle Businesses or Why I Quit Web Design”